Sheep Guarding Llama

It is a dreary, rainy Monday morning.  Exactly my kind of weather.  It was so cold and dreary that we decided that we would not try to jump the car this morning because that would mean packing up the girls and going for a long drive in the cold and the rain to wherever it is that we might want to go, which because it is a Monday is very likely to be closed anyway.  So that did not seem like it would be a very good idea all around.  We will just put it off until tomorrow.  At this point it really does not seem to matter one way or another.

I ended up spending the whole day working up in the office loft doing posting and writing and some technical projects.  Dominica watched a new Canadian television show that she is newly addicted to for a bit of the day.

This evening I went down with the last remaining main bit of cash that we have left and did some grocery shopping.  That was fifty Euros of groceries.  We have a few Euros left, but not much.  Without the car, the only way to get cash is for me to walk to Atsipopoulo which is not terrible, but not close, either.  I have been hoping to not have to do that but it is looking likely that I will need to.  We have made it for nearly a full month with only hitting the ATM twice in all of this time and due to a combination of the local withdrawl amounts and our bank policy back in the States we are unable to take out more than about $305 each time meaning that we have only gone through about $610 of cash in a month which is less than our normal ATM withdrawl amounts would suggest.  Dominica even remarked at how little we go to the ATM here in Greece than we did while living in Nicaragua where it seemed to be every four days and we were taking out larger amounts, too.

Dominica made a delicious tuna casserole for dinner tonight.  The girls were not thrilled, but the adults enjoyed it.  We watched a little of Are You Being Served? tonight, too. We were hoping that Liesl would enjoy watching it with us, but she was not interested and left to do something on her own.

We got the girls off to bed by eleven.  They did not go to sleep, though, until easily two thirty.  Dominica stayed up until two watching her show and had no idea that the time was passing but then had insomnia and was easily awake until five or six.  I was up until around five working and then off to bed.  The girls are in our room again tonight with Liesl on the floor.

We overslept this morning.  Dominica did not realize that Luciana had managed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and was feeling better after a few days of being constipated and that we would be able to travel this morning so she did not jump out of bed as early as she had intended to.  So when we got up in the late morning we were in a rush to attempt to get everyone ready, out the door and off to Knossos to go see the ruins.

We scrambled like crazy, got showered, dressed, packed, out the door, loaded up the car and…. I had left the lights on last week and the car batter was completely dead.  We are not going anywhere today.

We all went back to the house and decided that the kids would just have a play day.  Maybe we will try the car again on the morrow.  I walked down to the corner store and got bread, milk and a few items that we were out of and asked about getting the car jumped.  The owner said that I should come back in the morning and his wife would call someone for us to come and jump the car.  So that will likely be easy.

I did some posting and a bunch of site work today.  Then I took some time and played Portal up till the final challenge of level eighteen which is nauseatingly difficult and impossible for me with the Steam Controller.  I will have to save it to try with a mouse at some point. Maybe that way I will be able to do it, but as it is it goes from slightly challenging to impossible all at once and there is just no way for me to do it.

After that I played some Hexcells Infinite, I am now seventy five percent of the way to the big “Infinite Sixty” badge.  No idea why I want that, but it will make me feel good to earn.  And I finished playing Quell.  Liesl came in to join me while I played that and snuggled.  She helped me with the game but we were near the end of it so the puzzles were really hard.

Our cell phone service has been down for over a week now.  We have no idea what is going on.  Because we never drive anywhere we have no idea what might be the issue.  Maybe our local tower is down.  Maybe there is an issue.  Maybe it works the moment we are outside of town.  We use wifi at the house and have an old fashioned land line for emergencies so it has not been a big deal, we never make calls with the cell service anyway.  Hopefully it works when we are away from the house.

We were all feeling lazy today so it was fish sticks and veggie sticks (like fish sticks but filled with corn, peas and other veggies) for dinner.  It was quite yummy.

We actually got the kids off to bed just after ten thirty tonight!  We have, for over a week now, had a bedtime alarm.  First an alarm goes off to let them know that it is about forty five minutes before time for bed.  Then another alarm goes off when it is actually bed time.  This has been working great.  Before they would stay up way too late and be caught off guard when suddenly it was time to head to bed and be upset that they had not done something that they had been pushing off like eating or watching a video.

Thinking back to when I was their ages, we always had very obvious prime time television that put us into a standard groove.  When I was Luciana’s age, it was seven o’clock, once the news was over, for younger viewing.  When I was Liesl’s age the shows ran from eight until ten five nights a week.  That prime time slot made it super easy to have a set schedule in the evening.  Get everything done by eight, sit down and it was Who’s the Boss, Growing Pains, Alf, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Family Ties, Cheers, Taxi or whatever.  Two hours, most nights, and you knew each half hour clearly until the night was over and it was time to go to bed.  Or get ready for bed or whatever.  It gave the evening some perspective.  With video games and YouTube and Netflix they do not have that at all now.  So the alarms help, in a small way, to provide that.  Looking at it from that perspective makes it make a lot of sense to me.

No late night for us.  It was after midnight, but not long afterwards that Dominica and I went to bed.  Maybe we are onto a good schedule now?  It is Luciana sleeping on the floor tonight. Now the girls are competing for who gets to sleep on the floor.  They are both like me and like the hard floor and unlimited space but having everyone nearby.  Liesl is sad that she doesn’t get to be on the floor but gives up the spot to Ciana willingly.  Ciana dislikes being crushed in the middle of the bed whereas Liesl enjoys the extra snuggles.

I had insomnia last night and so my morning started around seven with what might actually have been zero sleep.  I went to my desk and posted for a while. Luciana was up early, around eight, but went back to bed.  Liesl was up around nine and Dominica a bit later like ten or eleven.

I did a ton of responding to the thousands of messages that I have had backlogged on Spiceworks for years and I managed to get caught up on SGL posting today as well.  And MangoLassi was rather active early this morning, too.

Liesl played The Sims 3 as soon as she got up.  I waited until the girls were done playing games and the room was available before moving in and trying my hand at playing the classic physics three dimensional puzzle masterpiece Portal which my dad likes to play as well.  There are nineteen levels in the original Portal and I managed to get up to halfway through the sixteenth one on my first sitting.  But by that point I was pretty tired, having played for over an hour and a half, and needed to put it down and go take a nap as I was falling asleep while I was playing.

I went up around two and laid down in the bed and slept until around six.  Four hours was perfect and I felt just fine.  Dominica was making dinner when I got up.  A Greek dish made from giant local beans.

All three of the girls spent the bulk of the evening playing The Sims 3.  The Steam system was engaged for at least seven continuous hours just for that!  This somewhat forced me to stay busy at my desk getting caught up on things, but I had been hoping to get a chance to return to playing Portal sometime this evening.  And I am just about ready to beat Quell as well.

Dominica wrapped up her gaming before two in the morning so that I could get in at least a little bit of time gaming before going to bed.

The girls are sleeping in our room, again.  They have been there for over a week now, I think.  Tonight Liesl insisted that she sleep on the floor so that I could have the bed.  All four of us do not fit in the bed together, so someone always has to have the floor.  Luciana will threaten to go sleep on her own in the loft if forced to have the floor and that makes Liesl sad as she wants everyone to be together.  So she and I have been taking turns on the floor.  She knows that my back has been bothering me for days and said that I should be in the bed tonight.

I slept in late this morning, until noon.  Sleeping on the floor worked out just fine, it did not bother me at all even though it is a solid floor and no carpeting and I was only on a thin blanket.  Amazingly sleeping on rock hard surfaces still does not bother me even after all of these years.

Liesl was starting school when I got up.  She and Dominica had been up playing The Sims 3 for a little while before I had gotten up.  Luciana played The Sims 3 a little bit before coming up to my office to sit with me and watch her school videos from Leap Frog.

Liesl said today that she loves her new, long school day format.  She is doing so much better in school now and has a great attitude even though she is starting earlier and doing so much more of it.  We are thrilled as she is moving so much faster and covering so much stuff.  Today she did a ton of studying Greek mythology, especially stuff around the Minoans and Knossos.

I had a very busy day of posting and working on open source projects, but it was productive and good.

Tonight Dominica made fake meatloaf from the local beans.  It was delicious.  Liesl really liked it, too.  We tend to eat dinner around nine at night these days.  And it often feels like lunch time.

It is Friday night and after getting the kids off to bed Dominica played The Sims 3 for a while (we have over one hundred hours logged on that game as a family now, and I have never played it myself in any form whatsoever; and those hours do not count the far greater time that Dominica put into The Sims and The Sims 2 over the years!)  Then when she went up to bed I played some video games and then tried to go to bed.

Dominica and I were both still awake around five.  She had the bed with the two girls, I was on the floor, again.  She fell asleep sometime between five and six.  I think that I got half an hour of sleep, or so, but maybe not even that much.  By ten till seven I had gotten almost no sleep but just was not tired or ready to be in bed so got myself up.

Luciana and I were actually awake at eight this morning!  Luciana got up to use the bathroom and then went down to the living room.  I went to the office and did some writing.  She fell asleep on the couch by the time that I had checked in on her.  So adorable.  Dominica slept in until around nine and Liesl until at least ten.

While Luciana and Liesl were sleeping and Dominica was taking some quiet time to read I got in a little video game time doing my daily Hexcells Unlimited and then playing a mission on Saints Row 2.  I had forgotten how much I enjoy that game.  I really want to finish it up because I have heard that Saints Row 3 is really amazing and a huge step above its predecessor but I do not want to start it until I have completed the one before it.

Luciana asked and asked to play The Sims 3 so I went back to writing and let her play for an hour or two.

Liesl is having another full day of school today.  She was awake, had breakfast and straight to her school work.  And it was another day of big time success, too.  She was happy and super productive and just went from subject to subject doing projects and learning all kinds of stuff.  They have done a lot of history focus because we are hoping that we might be able to pull off a trip to the ruins at Knossos this weekend.  It is less than a two hour drive so not bad at all.  But we would need to wake up and actually get moving to be able to pull it off.  Not easy for us these days.

One of the neighbours stopped by this evening just to drop off some of their own sheep’s milk that they get from the sheep next to our house!  People here are so nice and we have never had sheep’s milk so this is very interesting.  There are lots of sheep and goats on Crete but we have not seen a single cow, yet.

Ours days have felt so short ever since getting to Greece.  It feels like we are just getting started on the day and it is already midnight.  The time flies by ridiculously quickly.

Dominica and the girls played more of The Sims 3 today and I got in a little of the puzzle game Quell before going to bed myself.